The Emperor's Legion (Watchers of the Throne #1) - Chris Wraight Page 0,60

the way I’d come, knowing that I’d need to remove my armour and treat that wound soon. It was as I reached the end of the corridor that I saw the clean-up team arrive – six troopers, plus one of Slovo’s surviving menials.

That was odd. There was no reason for the Navigator to send someone. I looked up at him, and he bowed.

‘My lord, Navigator Rehata wishes to speak to you at once,’ he said.

I waved him away and made to push past, but – somewhat unbelievably – he held his ground.

‘We can’t go back in, you see,’ he said, nervously. ‘It’s the Astronomican. The beacon. It’s gone.’

Slovo looked even worse than normal. I wondered if I was driving him to his death, and a part of me felt some guilt for that. It wouldn’t change anything, though, and I would have happily undertaken the same trials if our roles had been reversed. All that mattered was the objective, and we were all subordinate to that.

‘There’s just nothing,’ he said, miserably, dabbing a filthy cloth at his sallow face. His visible eyes were ringed with purple, and the plugs on the back of his hands were swollen with bruising. ‘It blinked. It flickered. Then it went out.’

The tidings hurt me. I couldn’t detect the beacon, being even less receptive to its presence than a normal human was, but the prospect of what this might represent was like a physical blow.

Erefan was in the chamber with me, plus his deputy on the command bridge, a man named Rythan. A newly promoted lieutenant called Oriath now served as my garrison commander, the last three having died fighting incursions. He looked incredibly young to me, hardly more than a boy straight out of our training facility on Arraissa, and I didn’t relish the prospect of him leading an action against these enemies.

‘You’ve piloted ships in storms before,’ said Erefan wearily. ‘Is this not the same?’

Slovo laughed bitterly. ‘For a few moments, maybe.’ He looked at me accusingly. ‘I can still see the conduits. I can see how they move. But I can’t orientate it to anything. We could end up flying straight into the Eye, and I’d never know.’

‘You’d know that,’ muttered Rythan.

‘Then we make shorter jumps,’ said Erefan, also looking at me, this time for support.

‘Shorter jumps!’ Slovo’s laughter gained a manic edge. ‘Oh, then, shorter jumps.’ He leaned forwards across the table, his fingers shaking from lack of sleep. ‘They’re screaming for us out there,’ he growled. ‘You’ve no idea what I’m seeing. The universe is breaking apart. There’s a chasm now as far as I can see, and nothing leaking over from the other side.’ His eyes were darting now between us all. ‘This isn’t a storm. It’s something else. I’ve seen other ships, burning down in the deeps, broken open, mauled like carcasses. If we stay out here long enough, that’ll be us.’

I looked at Erefan. How far?

He shrugged. ‘Hard to tell. We’ve nothing to gauge by. Even the star charts seem awry, but we’re triangulating again.’ He saw that his answer was less than useless to me, and tried again. ‘I’d say that in normal circumstances we’d be a few weeks out, burning as hard as we could. But we’ve got a lot of damage now and a full medicae bay. I can hardly staff the bridge, let alone the rest of the ship.’

I found it irritating how often my officers reminded me of the problems. They were tired, I knew that, but still it would have been nice if just one of them could have offered something more positive when I asked them.

‘We could Geller-seal the cargo and bilge levels,’ said Oriath then, hesitantly. ‘I spoke to the master of the enginarium and he said it could be done. It’ll flood them with radiation, so we’d lose them, but it’d be less to patrol at least.’

I smiled. Youth brought some advantages – perhaps I shouldn’t have been so quick to write him off.

Do it, I signed to Erefan. Then I returned to Slovo. The map.

He rolled his eyes. ‘I wondered when you’d make me look at it again. Forget it. It’s like I told you, you can’t map the warp.’

Perhaps you’re wondering why I tolerated him speaking to me like that. I didn’t like it. One crunch of my fist into his sweaty face would have reminded him of the proper courtesies, but of course I couldn’t afford to lose him. His natural aversion to me had